Book Image

Hands-On GUI Application Development in Go

By : Andrew Williams
Book Image

Hands-On GUI Application Development in Go

By: Andrew Williams

Overview of this book

Go is often compared to C++ when it comes to low-level programming and implementations that require faster processing, such as Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs). In fact, many claim that Go is superior to C++ in terms of its concurrency and ease of use. Most graphical application toolkits, though, are still written using C or C++, and so they don't enjoy the benefits of using a modern programming language such as Go. This guide to programming GUIs with Go 1.11 explores the various toolkits available, including UI, Walk, Shiny, and Fyne. The book compares the vision behind each project to help you pick the right approach for your project. Each framework is described in detail, outlining how you can build performant applications that users will love. To aid you further in creating applications using these emerging technologies, you'll be able to easily refer to code samples and screenshots featured in the book. In addition to toolkit-specific discussions, you'll cover more complex topics, such as how to structure growing graphical applications, and how cross-platform applications can integrate with each desktop operating system to create a seamless user experience. By delving into techniques and best practices for organizing and scaling Go-based graphical applications, you'll also glimpse Go's impressive concurrency system. In the concluding chapters, you'll discover how to distribute to the main desktop marketplaces and distribution channels. By the end of this book, you'll be a confident GUI developer who can use the Go language to boost the performance of your applications.
Table of Contents (25 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
About Packt
Contributors
Preface
Comparison of GUI Toolkits
Index

Get started with walk


Now that we've learned a bit about the Walk library, let's see it in action. The steps that follow aim to create a trivial application using the Walk API, which will verify everything is working. If you have any problems with these steps, consider looking at the AppendixInstallation Details, and work through the Microsoft Windows section within Installing Go.

Setup

Before we can start writing a GUI with Walk, we need to install the library—this means that Go will be able to compile the code we write, and also that any development environments installed will be able to offer suggestions when writing the code. Simply execute go get github.com/lxn/walk from the Command Prompt. This command will download and install the Walk library to %GOPATH%/src so it can be used in your applications. If you have not set the GOPATH environment variable manually, don't worry, as the Go installer will have set up a default for you (normally %HOMEDRIVE%%HOMEPATH%/go).

Code

Now let's write...